Transgressing the Boundaries

For tonight's post, we'll cover the death of a company, the death of an economist, and the death of certainty, news of the last of which may be greatly exaggerated.

The company in question is GM, who I've bashed before for their crimes against the planet, and will now bash for crimes against human decency. Their commercial from the Super Bowl, which can be viewed here (scroll down), featured a robot that dropped a small part on the assembly line, got fired, progressed through a series of ever worse jobs, and in the end prepared to commit suicide before waking from a dream. As pointed out by ABC News, among others, GM announced last year that they are cutting 30,000 positions across the country by 2008:

"[The ad] is absolutely disgusting," said Art Reyes, president of United Auto Workers Local 651 in Flint, Mich., and a third-generation UAW member. Reyes said Local 651's membership has been cut in half in the past 18 months because of job cuts throughout the U.S. auto industry.

"Their way of life was affected. Their way of life was destroyed. This just completely glosses over their hardships," said Reyes. "What General Motors has been doing by tapping people on the shoulder to get rid of them, whole plants at a time, it wasn't because of a dropped bolt … we have a qualified work force here."

Way to go, shitheads on GM's advertising team! Remember, you don't have to pay benefits to your laid-off workers if they throw themselves off bridges!!!

Next up is the death of an economist, the legendary Anatol Rapoport. Who, you ask? He's the guy who invented the classic strategy for success at the Prisoner's Dilemma known as "Tit-for-tat", in which you basically act nice to people who are nice to you, and punish those who betray you. For vastly more on the topic, check out Brad DeLong's economics blog, which has a thorough recap of some more recent work. I personally prefer the following quote from Daniel Dennett, quoted here:

The social psychologist and game theorist Anatol Rapoport (creator of the winning Tit-for-Tat strategy in Robert Axelrod’s legendary prisoner’s dilemma tournament) once promulgated a list of rules for how to write a successful critical commentary on an opponent’s work. First, he said, you must attempt to re-express your opponent’s position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your opponent says “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.” Then, you should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement), and third, you should mention anything you have learned from your opponent. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

Someday, I might have the patience to try this with ridiculous rightwing wingnut drivel, but don't hold your breath.

Lastly, the death of science, and how exquisite the corpse still looks. About a decade ago, Alan Sokal published an article in a postmodern cultural criticism magazine called Social Text titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", which was quite intentionally composed of several pages of gibberish sprinkled with authoritative-sounding post-modern literature citations. Sokal, a physicist, was poking holes in the outlandish claims made by post-modern, far-left members of the academy who argued that since science was a social activity, it's results were inherently a product of culture and thus "subjective", rather than the objective truth they are often claimed to be. Scientists got very rightfully offended by many of the more extreme claims, in that we would argue that since experiments can be repeated independently in the physical sciences, there is an objective truth to the results, even if the interpretations and broader implications involve a human component. In other words, gravity works if you are male or female, black or white, young or old, and we're willing to drop any science studies professor who claims otherwise off a building to confirm who is right (we'll provide a landing pad so no one gets badly hurt). I would note that while the worst of the anti-science crowd were definitely on the left, they really were on the far left and never had much by way of mainstream representation outside of a few post-modernly inclined humanities departments at academic institutions.

Anyway, Sokal has now teamed up with Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science and blogger at The Intersection over to the right in our blogroll, to write an editorial on how these days the vastly dominant anti-Science trend is coming from the right. From the LA Times:

Such introspection on the academic left has been a heartening sign, and the pronouncements of extreme relativism have subsided significantly in recent years. This frees up defenders of science to combat the enemy on our other flank: an unholy (and uneasy) alliance of economically driven attacks on science (on issues such as global climate change, mercury pollution and what constitutes a good diet) and theologically impelled ones (in areas such as evolution, reproductive health and embryonic stem cell research).

The potency of this combination has become apparent during the six years of the Bush administration, as many if not most scientific agencies of our government have become embroiled in scandals involving the misrepresentation or suppression of scientific information, gag orders on scientist employees, or other interferences with the processes by which science feeds into decision-making. Tracing these intrusions back to their source, we almost always uncover the same pattern: It concerns an issue in which one of the two principal constituencies of the current administration — religious conservatives or big corporations — has a vested interest.

As if to prove their point, a poll of Republican Congressmen finds that only 13% believe in global warming, down 10% from last year!?! In the end, science will win over anti-science, because we have the universe on our side...assuming that some fraction of us manage to survive. Here's hoping.